Mercedes should be able to increase efficiency by working with Microsoft.
(Photo: dpa)
Vienna Short-time work, idle assembly lines, long delivery times: For almost two years, the automotive industry has been struggling with the serious consequences of the lack of chips. Mercedes-Benz is now drawing fundamental lessons from the industry disaster and is gradually converting its production. Specifically, the Stuttgart-based Dax group, together with the American IT giant Microsoft, wants to implement a new data platform in its 30 car plants worldwide.
Both companies announced this on Wednesday. The aim of the cooperation is to identify potential bottlenecks in the assembly of vehicles more quickly, to prioritize available resources for particularly lucrative models and to prevent unplanned downtimes in production.
Ideally, the Mercedes factories will be so stringently networked with Microsoft cloud services in the future that impending delivery delays can be prevented proactively with the help of real-time simulations and adapted production. As a positive side effect, Mercedes expects to be able to increase the efficiency of its car production by a fifth by 2025.
“The ability to predict and avoid problems in production and logistics is becoming a decisive competitive advantage on the way to the all-electric age,” states Jörg Burzer, Member of the Board of Management for Production at Mercedes. Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, assists: “We accelerate value creation by bringing the physical and digital worlds together.”
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As early as 2020, Mercedes announced that it would ban all paper from its production facilities with the specially developed MO360 ecosystem. Plant efficiency should increase by 15 percent by 2022. The digital system has now been further developed into the “MO360 Data Platform”. It is based on the Microsoft cloud Azure and is intended to help Mercedes become significantly more productive.
Virtual image of production
The new data platform is already operational in Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. It will soon be activated in the USA and China as well. The computing power of Microsoft forms the foundation on which Mercedes wants to make greater use of big data tools and use artificial intelligence globally.
This would make it easier to analyze and visualize data from production and purchasing in real time. Together with Microsoft, Mercedes wants to present a virtual image of its production process – from the supply chain to assembly and quality management.
For example, the availability of important components such as semiconductors, without which no modern car can do, is to be compared with the respective production orders and these in turn linked to the operational processes in production.
>> Read here: Mercedes increases sales by a fifth in the summer
The highlight: Even if there are serious problems in the supply chain, Mercedes will be able to maintain production at least for a few particularly relevant makes. In the future, there should be no more complete shutdowns of plants where the production lines stand still for days.
The 30 Mercedes plants should not only become more productive, but also save water, waste, electricity and climate-damaging carbon dioxide with the help of MO360. A special data analysis tool monitors and forecasts consumption. The group emphasizes that the best solutions in one plant could be established more quickly in the entire production network in the future.
Microsoft and Mercedes have been working closely together on connecting vehicles for years. Volkswagen and BMW are also cooperating with the Americans. What German carmakers value about Microsoft is that, unlike Google, Apple or Amazon, the tech group has so far had no real ambitions to challenge them for their core business.
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